They don't care, if in Europe they'll play back video at the standard European video frame rate. The main impact at 24 fps would be on the sound pitch, so if you're planning for European festivals 25p would make sense. 24 fps might be a consideration if shooting on film, but not video, but even then many European films are shot at 25 fps.

They don't care, if in Europe they'll play back video at the standard European video frame rate. The main impact at 24 fps would be on the sound pitch, so if you're planning for European festivals 25p would make sense. 24 fps might be a consideration if shooting on film, but not video, but even then many European films are shot at 25 fps.

I would be very surprised if any UK festival could not deal with 25, but it isn't really all that common for things intended for theatrical exhibition to be shot at anything other than 24 here. If they're to be posted in the US they might even be at 23.976.

You can convert between these, but retiming the audio is not a loss-free process.

I would be very surprised if any UK festival could not deal with 25, but it isn't really all that common for things intended for theatrical exhibition to be shot at anything other than 24 here. If they're to be posted in the US they might even be at 23.976.

You can convert between these, but retiming the audio is not a loss-free process.

Having gone through this exact process with an experienced post house in Norway for a short aiming at international festivals, my understanding is that 24 is highly recommended. I assume you will create a DCP, as a lot of international festival are using local movie theaters, and international movie theaters are slowly but surely going digital. In Norway every cinema is digital, but we're a bit ahead of the bunch on this one.

When making a DCP you have to take into consideration that the DCI specification still does not support 25 fps. So even if you can create a DCP that is 25 fps, which will play on a lot of digital cinemas, there is also a lot of equipment deployed in worldwide cinemas that only support the DCI standard 24 fps (and 48). So you'd have to make a 24 fps DCP for those theaters. This means you're 25 fps film will play (marginally) slower in those cinemas, and your sound quality will be (marginally) worse because you'd have to stretch the waveform to get from 25 to 24.

If you shoot 24, you will also have to make 25 fps versions for broadcast and DVD, but theatrical projection would always be my first priority, and the people in the know says going from 24 to 25 is preferable to the other way around because your movie will play a bit faster (better too fast than too boring) and your sound waveform will be compressed instead of stretched (better quality sound).

Anyway, that was the recommendation from my post house and their reasoning. We decided to shoot 24, and have had no issues so far.